Thursday, February 16, 2012

Years too late, I have finally finished The Wire. It was devastating, thrilling, terrifying, inspiring, and depressing, and pretty much always incredible acting, dialogue, and storytelling. The best television show I've ever watched? I don't know how to best judge that--because, ultimately, I'm not sure, The Wire even works as a television show, as we've traditionally understood them. Which is really the point: those who spent a lot of ink in years past talking about the brilliance of The Wire have usually been forced to admit that it doesn't work like a traditional television drama; it's more like a novel, and a 19th-century novel by Dickens or Zola at that. Of course, The Wire isn't alone having had such aspirations; the same could be said about many of the ground-breaking television dramas (The Sopranos, Mad Men, etc.) of the past 10 or 15 years. Clearly, the cable (and now digital) revolution has finally caught up with how writers and producers think the medium can be used to tell stories. Just as clearly, the British knew this a while ago (consider Prime Suspect)--but none of them, I think, gave us such a range of characters, all connected so clearly to such a sociologically (and morally!) grounding particular place. The best comparison is, inevitably, Homicide: Life on the Street, a show that I loved, and which I wonder might actually have been a better tv show than The Wire, if only because its aspirations didn't prevent it from occasionally going outside its own novelistic structure and treating itself like, well, a tv show. (Case in point: the winter 1997 episode, "The Documentary.") But did Homicide do for me, as a watcher, everything that The Wire did? Not nearly.

So let me document all that it did for me, all the ways I received its manifold characters and plots and surprises. This is, for me, my complete Wire experience.

Season 1The first season was the tightest, and I suppose the least ambitious of all the rest of the series which followed. It was, in this season, a very, very good police procedural, introducing to us some of the fundamental mainstays of the show: McNutly, Bunk, Griggs, Pearlman, and Daniels on the police side, and Omar and Bubbles on the street side. It also gave us Stringer Bell and the Barksdale organization, and at this point it would have been reasonable to assume that the entire program was going to be a long, entertaining face-off between Bell (perfectly dressed, wicked smart, and a complete monster, the perfect homo economicus) and McNutly (rumpled and overwrought and struggling against his own worst elements, in both dress, body, and soul). But no, despite some good scenes between them, the central moral arc of the story of season 1 belonged to D'AngeloBarksdale, and he is the key character in the two essential scenes which communicate the season's plot. First, when he teaches (with a foreshadowing none of us could have seen at the time!) Bodie and Wallace about chess:

And second, after Wallace, upon secret orders from Bell, has been murdered by Bodie and Poot (under suspicion--justified, though there was no way Bell could have known that--of turning evidence to the police), and D'Angelo, facing time for transporting drugs, wants Bell to tell him what has become of his friend:

Season 1 is about kings and pawns, and how everyone--both cops and robbers--are playing their roles, and heaven help anyone who tries to go off the board.

Season 2The second season was also tight and mostly self-contained, but it was during this season that you begin to see the show's ambitions broaden. Proposition Joe's character, and his connections with The Greek's organization, emerges as crucial to the developing economy of Baltimore's drug world; Bell's desire to be something more than a gangster is further fleshed out; Omar, through the confrontation with Brother Mouzone and the machinations of Bell, truly comes into his own. But all that is on the sidelines: the real action is a powerful, fully developed morality tale, told in the context of the collapse of blue-collar work and neighborhoods for Baltimore's white immigrant population. Again, in this season, a single figure--Frank Sabotka, a man who loves his union, his church, and his family, in that order, so much that he willingly embraces corruption and criminality to keep them going, and pays the price--dominates the crucial scenes of this season, and defines its central moral arc. First, Frank's furious socio-economic defiance of the police, in spite of the crimes (and bodies!) that he knows are piling up on his pier:

And second, after Frank is arrested, after his son Ziggy has lost control and got himself arrested for murder, after his nephew Nicky arrested for dealing in drugs, Frank watches his ultimate prize, rebuilding the grain pier that will bring business to his union, slips out of his fingers. After this, really, what is left for him to do, then to walk up to The Greek and embrace his doom?

Season 2 is my favorite season of the whole show, and while things from here on out got ever more complicated, deep, and intense, it was this straightforward story of class and ethnic determination and vain resistance to a world which cannot help but change, economically as well as socially, that rings most true to me.

Season 3The third season of The Wire is where the interweaving of storylines and mutually re-enforcing plots really took off. We start examining city politics through the ambitions of Tommy Carcetti and the manipulations of Clay Davis; the struggle between the various factions in Baltimore's drug economy, with the rise of Marlo Stanfield and his organization, goes into high gear; we start to see the possibilities of redemption in Cutty's release from jail and his honest struggles to figure out a place for himself in a world where "the game" is no longer for him; and, of course, there is Bunny Colvin, and his experiment with drug legalization in "Amsterdam." In some ways, this resulted in the most loosely structured, least effective season overall, though it was still excellent television, and included some scenes of tremendous power. But picking amongst all that was going on this season to find consistent through-lines is hard. Two do stand out, though. There is the tremendously suspenseful and ominous balcony scene between Avon and Bell, both of them having sold each other out, and both of whom will be out of the picture by the season's end:

But for a real moral journey this season, I have to point, not to the finally doomed main street dreams of Bell, but to Ellis Carver--a small player throughout the whole show, but one who Colvin'sexperiment puts on a different path. Once he was a slacker cop, hard-working but without direction or perspective, willing to engage in petty corruption and betrayal when it suited him. Under Colvin, he learns loyalty, dedication to the job, and a mature sense of the streets that he serves. His vision is widened, he feels his failures (and he has a doozy coming up) more deeply, he finds a quiet confidence that puts his friend and one-time partner, the incorrigible thug Herc, to shame. To a degree, by the final episode of the last season, Carver has emerged as perhaps the emblematic police officer of the whole series--and nothing did more to get his character to that end then this scene right here:

Season 3 is a story of rises and falls; some get up from their falls and try again, whereas many others stay down.

Season 4

A lot of people argue that the fourth season was The Wire's best, and I can see why--the shift to looking at Baltimore's school system was utterly immersive, surrounding us with brilliant little character moments (the teachers, the students, the academics, the do-gooders and power-hungry cops and drug addicts) while enveloping us in a fascinating, fierce picture of the harm which fear, poverty, and a culture of violence has on the young black people of America's mostly ignored underclass. It was, truly, the most realized, most perfectly balanced, season of the whole show. It's impossible to pick only one scene to capture the interaction between the four young men--Mike, Dukie, Namond, and Randy--and the adults who either hasten them towards or present alternatives to the destiny which awaits them all, so I'll pick two. Watch how their different personalities are foreshadowed by this scene: Mike, a hard-case with a code; Dukie, a follower robbed of the ability to do otherwise than what others suggest; Randy, a kid with a spirit of a joiedevivre just waiting to be hammered out of him; and Namond, the punk who is, nonetheless, smart enough to see the stakes.

The greatest moral arc of season four, though, is Bubbles. He's been around since the very beginning, fighting his addictions or inventively glorying in them, and he's seen tough times before, but only now, truly, do the same streets and the same corrupt forces which grinds down three of our four young, lead him to take steps that finally put him on bottom. As Walon, his once-and-future sponsor, said, no one will truly seek to change until they've lost it all. Now, Bubbles has.

Season 4 is about the harshest, most honest and most despairing, but also the most decent, season of television I've ever watched. It's a story about how most of the time, most of us can't be saved--but sometimes, one or two of us just might be. It's not my favorite season of The Wire, but I agree it's probably the best.

Season 5The fifth season doesn't get much respect from those who loved the show--they agree that it stayed great until the end, to be sure, but they felt the end was rushed, almost ginned up to tie everything together in a tidy package. I can see the point of that--but the truth is, what possible way could there be to bring the story of a whole city, a whole economy, a whole racial and class tragedy, to an end? I give season 5 some credit: it provided us with a resolution, of sorts, for the two greatest losses from the previous season, Mike and Dukie:

And Omar's story also comes to an end, in some ways providing, again, a kind of resolution to the struggle for honor in the midst of a drug war that slowly but surely went from neighborhood pride, to cold-blooded business, to simple exercises of tyrannical power. Omar is a broken man by the end of the series, shattered by his own inability to bend from his mission; his death is almost poetic.

But ultimately, the real moral arc of the fifth season is one which was promised since the very first episode: McNulty, every last horrible and brilliant part of him, comes under the microscope, and he somehow just barely manages to escape with his skin, and our respect, intact. The death of Bell at the end of season 3 had seemed to pull back McNulty back from the edge, and as season 4 unfolded, I started to believe that The Wire was going to do the nigh-impossible: take beloved, complicated anti-hero, and let him fade away into ordinary domesticity. Instead, McNulty in season 5 re-emerges, angrier than ever, pushing his scams to force the police department to work further than ever before--I'm sure I'm not the only viewer who truly believed that he was going to murder a homeless man, just to keep his lie alive. He pulls back, at the last moment, and it's really only because his lie was so huge (and had been unwittingly furthered by a certain lying fool in the media) that the powers that be couldn't let everything come down around him that he was able to back away and, one hopes, finally realize who he is. The result is probably the funniest scene in the whole show:

And then finally, the truest:

Season 5 ends The Wire by telling a story about telling stories about Baltimore. The stories in question are told to voters, to newspaper readers, and to ourselves. Some stories, like McNulty's, hurt (even if they do some good). Some stories, like the one Bubbles is able to stand and deliver at the end, heal. Ultimately, that's what we all are--story-telling animals. The Wire gets that absolutely right.

Quotes

"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."